Apropos Fr. Hans point– The musical ‘rent’ is all about amazing singing trying to cover over the short, difficult and often unhappy lives those choices and pressures led to.

Anything’s “possible”. My objection is to the notion that reparative therapy is generally successful (or even always psychologically sound) and that a Christian should despair over their salvation if they remain same-sex oriented.

In 2005, Joseph Nicolosi of NARTH stated that :

One third experience “significant improvement — they understand their homosexuality and have some sense of control.” However, they may engage in same-sex sexual behavior.

Another third are “cured;” they refrain from same-sex behavior and the strength and frequency of their same-sex desires is diminished, but not necessarily gone.

The other third fail to change.

Dr Nicolosi has a very liberal definition of “cured”, in my estimation. Keep in mind that these are often the most motivated persons and are people who are willing and seeking to change. As such, I just cannot see a Christian pastor or counselor encouraging someone into this potentially expensive and useless therapy.

Rob won’t point to studies because there aren’t any. The effort to normalize homosexual behavior consists primarily of what he displays: dismissing objections as uninformed, branding critics as flat-earthers, shading the words of people like Dr. Throckmorton to imply that homosexual behavior ought to be culturally normative and so forth.

But there is another dimension to this question as well, one that has plenty of statistical background. The health risks associated with homosexual behavior are nothing short of catastrophic. See:

Study: HIV-positive Practicing Homosexual Men 9000% More Likely to Develop Anal Cancer

Male Homosexual Sex Fuelling Spread of HIV in Asia, Warns World Health Organization

California Homosexual Organization Admits HIV/AIDS is “Gay Disease”

The Health Risks of Gay Sex (.pdf here)

ZENIT – Medical Downside of Homosexual Behavior

Rob might argue the gay lobby position, that promiscuity among heterosexuals has led to increased health risks as well, and he would be right. But homosexual activity is uniformly unhealthy due to the nature of homosexual acts. No amount of arguing against those who don’t see homosexual behavior as normal can change this fact.

Here’s the next disease appearing because of promiscuity which will hit both heterosexuals and homosexuals alike, but will affect homosexuals disproportionally since they engage more partners more often:

Revealed: Oral sex is ‘bigger cause of throat cancer than tobacco’

Rob, you are still not dealing with the facts or the logic. You haven’t produced anything to show that therapy does more harm than good, you haven’t produced anything to show that gay parenting doesn’t produce more gays, and you haven’t addressed the issue of what to tell the young. You are only throwing up chaff to hide the truth. All Spitzer says in this video is that change is “quite rare.” Well of course it’s rare — because people like you are telling everybody it’s not even possible. Any honest viewer can see that Spitzer is backpedaling under pressure from the gay lobby. I doubt now that you are an honest viewer.

He who has ears to hear, let him hear.

Dn Mitchell: I am basing my opinions on the words of Dr Spitzer himself who is referenced in your link. “[Dr Spitzer] strongly emphasized the fact that he did not think most gay people could become heterosexual and that change was extremely rare.”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZwE6_dLweYo&feature=player_embedded

Rob, you are still not dealing with the study showing that gay couples often produce gay children or Dr. Spitzer’s research showing that many people can escape same-sex attraction (SSA) through therapy. You are just going on a few cases (mostly anecdotal) of unsuccessful therapy and repeating another line that gay activists memorize to dismiss many documented cases of successful therapy. The line is that therapy causes depression and suicide and therefore does more harm than good, but where is the statistical proof of this? What’s the suicide rate for people who have undergone reparative therapy versus the suicide rate for gays who have not? How do you know that the suicide rate for the former is not lower than for the latter?

You may be well intentioned, but many well-intentioned people have been bowled over by gay propaganda disguised as academic research, aimed at convincing people that SSA is natural and normal. The wickedness of that propaganda is easier to see when you consider the effect of the born-gay and therapy-causes-suicide assumptions on young people who are a little confused about their sexual identity but who have not yet become sexually active. Your view condemns them to a life of misery on the assumption that that’s just the way they are and there’s nothing they can safely do about it. The truth is otherwise. People aren’t born gay, healing can happen, and the Christian thing to do is help them heal.

I stand corrected. Dr. Rekers was, according to Wikipedia, on the founding board of the Family Research Council, not NARTH.

Here’s the thing: one’s actions are always (with varying degrees of “ease”) choices. One’s interior disposition is not.

Dr. Warren Throckmorton is a respected Christian counselor who has rejected the re-orientation route, instead choosing to assist his patients live according to their faith and values. He produced a film entitled “I Do Exist” which detailed the lives of some who came to him for assistance. Dr Throckmorton has, however, acknowledged that one of those individuals who originally professed to being an “ex-gay” has since recanted their testimony and now lives as an openly gay Christian.

My concern is that I am aware of numerous well-intentioned and sincere individuals who, when “re-orientation” failed, became despondent and despairing, some of whom attempted suicide. The evidence seems to suggest that reparative therapy is often destructive. Given the fact that one of its most vocal supporters was found engaging in behavior that no heterosexual male would engage in, I am quite leery of any claims about its success.

I find Dr Warren’s approach to be both psychologically sound and inline with Christian ethics.

Rob, I’ve heard these lines before. Gay men memorize them to repeat whenever somebody mentions Cameron or NARTH, so they don’t have to deal with anything of substance. You are doing that now instead of addressing the two studies I mentioned, which were NOT done by Cameron or NARTH. Can’t you do better? You are not even factually correct about Cameron or NARTH. Cameron was expelled not for unethical behavior but for refusal to cooperate with a witch hunt, and the man who took the European vacation was not a founder of or major contributor to NARTH.

Your first quote references Paul Cameron’s studies, it seems. In case you were not aware, Paul Cameron was dismissed from the APA and was censured by the American Sociological Association, the Nebraska Psychological Association and Canadian Psychological Association for unethical behavior. Even many on the far right want nothing to do with him.

In regards to NARTH, well, one of their founders and major contributors had made claims of the efficacy of “ex-gay therapy” for years, but that was before he was discovered on a European vacation with a male escort he met off a seedy internet site and who provided him erotic massages on their trip. I hope you understand if I find the organization’s claims of their ability to eradicate homosexual orientation to be a bit suspect.

Well, Rob, here’s a much more recent study that contradicts the study you mentioned above. This one suggests that the children of gay couples are indeed more likely to end up gay. And why wouldn’t they?

While I’m at it, here’s another study showing that people can shift from a homosexual orientation to a heterosexual orientation with the help of therapy. The study was conducted by Dr. Robert L. Spitzer, eminent member of the mainstream psychiatric community, recently retired professor of psychiatry at Columbia University, chairman of the task force of the third edition of the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, “one of the most influential psychiatrists of the 20th century” according to The New Yorker, and the man who “spearheaded the APA’s 1973 decision to remove homosexuality from its list of mental disorders” according to The Washington Post. Spitzer told the Post that his research “shows some people can change from gay to straight, and we ought to acknowledge that.”

Why people so hate themselves and one another that we turn aside from that freedom, joy, strength and full humanity to wallow in the beastiality of our passions is beyond me.

It is not that they hate themselves and one another … I believe that most often it is just darkness, which represents ignorance, error, falsehood and sin. There are not enough people to show the way, beacons of light to warn, guide, and inspire people on their journey to God.

However, even if there were they have nothing to do with a person’s salvation or communion with God.

The most such studies can show is the ability of human beings to adapt outward behavior to social norms whether or not the social norms are consistent with God’s will or not. I guess it depends on what ‘reality’ one prefers, what assumptions one prefers to operate from and what ontological vision one has. I prefer the vision that human beings are created in the image and likeness of God, not the image and likeness of some vacant, truncated and distorted vision created by social scientists.

I find your response similar to the issue of how some respond to the debate over young Earth creationism. Belief often precludes us from accepting evidence to the contrary.

While we may retain our belief that homosexual conduct is sinful in the eyes of God (as is divorce and remarriage, fornication, adultery, masturbation and all other forms of sexual conduct outside the bonds of holy matrimony), we are going to appear out of touch with reality if we are unable to provide some form of anecdotal evidence from an unbiased, peer-reviewed study that gay marriage and adoption or exposure to gays will lead to more crime, poverty and a lack of intellectual and personal achievement.

Unless I know the biases of those making the study, the parameters under which they studies were undertaken, I don’t make much of them. Psychological/sociological studies are notorious for mirroring the outcome desired by those who designed the study. That goes for Dr. Grossman’s as well.

I rely on the consistent witness of the Church, the Nation of Israel, etc, that same gender attractions and homosexual behaviour is disordered, sinful and harmful to those who participate in it and the society of which they are a part. No matter how one parses the ‘studies’ or the politically correct garbage of the moment, the teaching of the Church remains. In Christ, we can all become fully human regarless of our particular disorder or sin–no matter how deep, how disfiguring or intractable it may seem, but only in Christ and by His grace. The more we recognize our own sins and the more deeply we repent: the more human we become; the stonger and more able we become; the more joyous we become; the more free we become.

Christianity is not a way to live with oneself and to paper over one’s misery and dysfunction. It is a way to overcome, through the Cross.

Why people so hate themselves and one another that we turn aside from that freedom, joy, strength and full humanity to wallow in the beastiality of our passions is beyond me. I guess we’d rather rule in hell than serve in the Kingdom.